Living a Better Life: Simple Solutions for a Complicated World

How many of the estimated 27 million modern slaves work for you? Men, women, and around the world in forced labour, sexual slavery, child labour, bonded labour, forced marriage, and descent-based slavery to bring us our consumer goods, clothes, and even food.

Do you see the brutality and political persecution by other nations, or perhaps the misery and poverty of sweatshops churning out cheap clothes?

Is it the image some politicians, media, and security services paint of terrorists running amok in our country, the bureaucrats of the European Union interfering with our ‘liberty’, or our businesses supposedly crippled with ‘red tape’?

Like this:

Capitalism is not bad. It seems to have become fashionable to denounce capitalism as the root of all our problems, but the socialist model is just as bad. Any organization is defined and its culture shaped by its people and the weak ones are driven by greed and the lust for power.

Like this:

How do you decide when something is too expensive? Are you logical, weighing up the benefits you will gain against the effort (work) it will take to pay for it? Or do you lean toward the more impulsive, eager to possess the next ‘must have’ item.

Modern marketing is about solving problems we don’t have. And the truth is that retailers and manufacturers have to stop selling us things we don’t need or won’t last; but almost no business is prepared to face this. Fortunately the solution is actually quite simple and good for business, us, and our planet.

The term ‘Retail Therapy’ was used in 1986 to describe what was wrong with us – using shopping bags to fix our ‘psychic ills’ – but we’ve turned it into a badge of honour! And in 2001 a European survey showed that a third of shoppers have a “high level of addiction to rash or unnecessary consumption”. The ‘cure’ is worse than the illness.